Shares in SharpLink Gaming, a gambling marketing firm and affiliate network operator, are down more than 38% since the market opened, despite the company finalizing an investment round to help it acquire up to $425 million in Ethereum.
The company, which last week announced plans to create an Ethereum-focused digital asset treasury, saw its shares surge as high as $124, after trading at $6 as recently as May 23.
After closing at $76.70 on Friday, SharpLink shares—which trade with ticker SBET on the Nasdaq Exchange—are trading at $47.16, down more than 38% since open and a whopping 62% down from last week's peak.
On the other hand, the stock price is still up 1,162% over the past month.
With the conclusion of its $425 million round, Ethereum co-founder and Consensys CEO Joseph Lubin became chairman of SharpLink’s board of directors. Consensys led the private placement round, funded in both fiat currency and ETH, which also included participation from prominent crypto investors like Galaxy Digital, Pantera Capital, Electric Capital, Arrington Capital, GSR, and ParaFi Capital.
(Disclosure: Consensys is one of 22 investors in an editorially independent Decrypt.)
The company’s newly established treasury pivot makes it the latest in a series of publicly traded companies adopting digital asset treasuries, a move popularized by the Bitcoin-stacking Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) and outspoken co-founder Michael Saylor.
Those companies range from DeFI Development Corporation (formerly Janover), an AI-powered real estate platform that has built nearly a $100 million Solana treasury, to President Donald Trump’s Trump Media & Technology Group, which recently raised $2.4 billion to buy Bitcoin.
SharpLink, though, is the most notable company to focus on acquiring Ethereum, crypto’s second largest asset by market capitalization. The firm’s Monday press release announcing the finalization of the funding says it will become the largest publicly traded holder of ETH.
ETH has been the butt of many jokes over the last year, especially as it has underperformed competing layer-1 blockchains like Bitcoin and Solana—but some optimism is growing for the asset following a price surge in May following the Pectra network upgrade.
Last week, BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes told Decrypt that he believes ETH could touch $4,000-$5,000 in 2025, potentially making a new all-time high in the process as the “most hated layer-1.” Plus, analysts from Bernstein have indicated a growing interest in underlying networks where stablecoins have a major presence, a metric ETH dominates with more than 51% of stablecoin market share, per the firm’s investment note.
ETH is up 0.9% in the last 24 hours and is the best-performing coin in the top 10 by market cap over the last week, according to CoinGecko, dropping just 0.7% in that time to $2,532.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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